Philip Broadbent and Sabine Hake,eds,Berlin: Divided City,1945–1989

Reviewed by: Monica Black, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA

Berlin: Divided City packs a considerable cargo of scholarship into a slim volume. Bringing together the work of scholars of architectural design and theory, cultural and visual studies, and film and literature, as well as historians and art historians, the essays in the book are brief, perhaps tantalizingly so in some cases, but the brevity also makes for a manageable introduction to an array of recent work on many topics. The volume is the result of a workshop convened in 2008 by editors Philip Broadbent and Sabine Hake at the University of Texas, Austin, and it attests not only to scholars’ enduring fascination with Berlin, but also with the ‘Divided City’ – a distinctive entity shaped by the destruction of World War II and subsequent rebuilding, Allied occupation, Cold War enmity, espionage, aesthetic movements and radical enthusiasms of many varieties, and by a dizzying array of approaches to ‘the good life’ – and not just those we too-reductively label ‘state socialist’ and ‘capitalist’.

The book is divided into four sections, ordered chronologically. The first deals with the immediate post-war period (‘Cold War Beginnings’); it is followed by respective sections on East and West Berlin; the volume concludes with a section on (re)unified Berlin (‘Berlin after Unification: Looking Back and Beyond’). Topics in these various sections include illicit sex in the ruins of the immediate post-war city; the propagandistic role of art and architecture in both East and West; soundscapes, radio and music; and the construction of such iconic landmarks as the Fernsehturm (television tower), the Palace of the Republic and Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum. The volume also explores various attempts to represent division and border crossing – of many sorts – on canvas, on film and in literature, and examines, in addition, the student movement, feminist film, the city’s filmic and visual imaginary, Wende-era photography, and the remaking of the city in the years since unification. In all, this is a rich and thought-provoking collection of themes and topics.

Placing such a diverse set of subjects into a single frame is not a simple matter, but the editors see them as connected by three threads. They argue, first, for the ‘centrality of modernism’ (3) for understanding the Divided City – debates over the meaning and significance of which informed everything from the construction of ordinary housing projects and other forms of vernacular architecture to conflicts over the pedagogical potential of high art. A second thread emerges from consideration of the ‘overlapping binaries of East and West, German and European, and European and American that placed Berlin at the … center of the Cold War’ (3). Without an acknowledgement of these binaries, the editors contend, we cannot fully appreciate the centrality of culture to shaping and ‘articulating … ideological confrontation’ (3). A third thread, for the editors, is the primacy of the aesthetic: efforts to shape perceptions of the capital city of the Cold War, to remake urban space, and to enable and constrain certain experiences of the urban environment. The volume’s emphasis on the centrality of culture (albeit conceived in very particular ways) links the aims of Berlin: Divided City to such crucial, earlier works as Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s In a Cold Crater and Brian Ladd’s The Ghosts of Berlin, and indeed those books are touchstones for several of the authors whose work features in the volume.

Like other lost worlds perhaps, divided Berlin haunts the imagination with vanished possibilities. What Berlin: Divided City demonstrates as well as anything else is that as division curtailed certain kinds of movement, certain potentialities, it inspired and produced others. Above all, divided Berlin acted, if not by choice, as a uniquely productive cultural realm, one whose very limits facilitated and created opportunities that would not – could not, arguably – have been realized in any other place. Music, painting, photography: these subjects mattered in the divided city in ways that are difficult fully to appreciate today, when aesthetic value is so often articulated in the language of individual choice and market share. Art, architecture, film – these were indeed ‘overdetermined’ in ‘organizing cultural life’ (4) in the capital city of the Cold War; their politicization was both a result of superpower rivalry and the very means through which that conflict took shape. In divided Berlin, as many of the essays in this volume demonstrate, the very fate of the future sometimes seemed to hang in the balance between cultural expression and ideology.